If you have ever read through the First Book of Kings, the passage we have for our first reading this Sunday certainly would have stood out. It is a book about the lives of the kings of Israel and Judah. They are born, they go to war, often they are killed. There are lots of stories and characters, and those stories and character are not always edifying. This short passage is different. It is the story of Elijah on Horeb, the mountain of God, when the prophet encounters God

St Dominic spent his life salting the earth and lighting the world; so, we celebrate him today, in the hope that we may follow him here on earth and so into heaven. To follow the way of Dominic, we need to look at his life. Our Dominic was born at the high point of the Reconquista, that series of military campaigns by a coalition of Christian rulers to retake the Iberian Peninsula. And so, even from the cradle, Dominic had impressed upon him a key principle: heroic efforts

You'll be pleased to know that our group for new and aspiring Catholics is flourishing. Good numbers show up on Wednesday nights for our RCIA group; a similar number have already received initiation this year. Please God, there will be many more. Everyone is always welcome; we’re ready to welcome you as soon as you’re ready. This is the Lord’s work among us and in you. For new Catholics, there is a detachment from the original community. If they’re coming from a Christia

When I was a kid I sometimes saw movies in which one of the characters called out, “Smithkins, you’re fired!” To me back then, it seemed like a moment of power. But, a few years ago when I found myself in that situation, the experience was quite different. I was running a theological college in another country, and one of the ancillary workers, let’s call him Raphael, was going through a marital crisis. We were arranging marriage counselling for them, but before it could t

In today’s Gospel, we hear the beginning of chapter 13 of Matthew’s Gospel, which scholars call the “parabolic” discourse of Jesus (don’t worry, it has nothing to do with mathematics!). It’s the third of five discourses in the Gospel of Matthew, so we are right in the heart of his Gospel. There are seven parables in this chapter. We hear the first, and the longest, today, and we will hear the rest of them over the next two Sundays. Given that we are entering into Matthew’s pa

Rhetoric, the art of giving finely crafted and persuasive speeches, is often condemned. The paradox about condemnations of rhetoric, however, is that the best of them are themselves finely crafted speeches, great examples of precisely what they apparently condemn. There is something of that in Jesus’ praising the Father for hiding these things from the learned and the clever, and revealing them to little ones: Isn’t he also clever and obviously learned in the way he uses and

Jesus sometimes speaks words that can sound severe, even shocking, and this Gospel is no exception. “Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me.” At first hearing, we might almost want to step back from them. Surely the Lord does not ask us to love our families less? Surely the Gospel does not make us cold, harsh, or indifferent to those closest to us? Of course not. Christ does not destr

The year is 1630, and a Dominican friar is writing home. Fr Dominic Ibáñez de Erquicia has been preaching the Christian mission in Japan for the last seven years or so. He arrived in Japan in answer to the call for more missionaries, after Tokugawa’s persecution had depleted their numbers: our brother Dominic was thirty-three. Now forty, Fr Dominic sees that the persecution is reaching a new level. Whereas before, he was able to disguise himself as a merchant to visit Cat

The Lord's feeling for the crowds and the action he takes speak to what health and holiness is. We believe health and holiness are when everything works as it is designed to do. Sickness and sin are inhibitors of the Creator’s design. We should just recognise that sickness and sin are used by God to make himself known to us: a sudden cure or a quick turn reveal the hand of God. But apart from that, there remain those times when we must contend with sickness and sin. Then

In order to realise the importance of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist one could appeal to the rather in depth theology of the Church. However the full power of what we celebrate at the altars in our Churches comes from the experience of the saints and those holy men and women who realised the true mystery and power of Christ’s abiding presence in his Body and Blood. One of these holy ones was Cardinal Francis-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, the heroic former archbish

Believing in God is a risky affair. Pick the wrong God, and it's over. Israel alone enjoys the certainty of revelation: the true God made himself known to them. We know that many of our Old Testament heroes and heroines spoke with God. Moses, for example, saw the Burning Bush and was given the tablets of God’s perfect law. This revelation by God gives us far superior knowledge of him than we can arrive at by ourselves. When it comes to believing in God, we take up what

You may have seen a movie in which a woman is in childbirth. Not much is shown, but we hear things: the mother groaning and gasping in labour, midwives offering encouragement, sounds of bystanders anxious, worried, apprehensive. And then there is one sound that resolves all the tension and brings it to a happy ending: the cry of the newborn baby. If the baby is crying, then the baby is breathing, and has thus made the absolutely essential first step to adjusting to life ou

Today’s feast marks a watershed moment in the history of salvation. It marks an end and a beginning. It is like a hinge on which turns God’s plan of salvation for humanity. We see this in the readings. In the Gospel, we heard the last words of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, just before his Ascension. And in the First Reading, we heard the first words of the Acts of the Apostles, and the last words of Jesus as he ascended. So, the Ascension is like a hinge which connects the minis

Jesus is going away. In today’s Gospel, he is going towards his death on the Cross. In the liturgical year, he is ascending back to heaven to take his seat at the Father’s right hand. Jesus says that he is going to send his disciples the Holy Spirit so as not to leave them orphans. But the Holy Spirit is not given instead of Jesus, a substitute to make up for his absence. Jesus himself will return to his disciples through the gift of the Holy Spirit. His disciples will know J

We are often told to ‘be true to ourselves.’ It can be found in the carefully curated images on social media that pose the question: “What version of myself do I want others to see?” It can be the common lived expression of “I just need to be true to myself.” Or it can be manifested in the ‘drop everything and reinvent your life’ narrative. Even in the “You do you”. These statements are portrayed as attractive. They sound freeing as opportunities of maturity, ownership,

We need a God who doesn’t need us. Our needs are big and simple: from God we need life and we need our mortality to be dealt with. If we have a God who needs us, he will be too weak to satisfy those needs. How could we follow someone who is looking to us for his needs, we who live just until our mortality gets the better of us. No, we need a God who doesn’t need us. The Lord warns us that whatever, whoever is not himself will steal, kill, and destroy us. That doesn’t hav

One of the many perverse events of the French Revolution was its regular public executions, at which crowds would gather to watch and cheer. A famous exception was the execution of the sixteen Carmelite sisters of Compiegne, when the crowd reportedly watched in silence. They seemed to realise that something truly horrific was happening, as they watched the sisters praying, singing, and kissing the statue of Our Lady, before they went up the scaffold to the guillotine. It is n

In these first weeks of Easter we see the paschal candle in all its glory. Taller than it will be as the year goes by, during Eastertide it is lit at all Masses, and until Pentecost it is always placed in a prominent place near the altar or ambo. Go up close to the candle and you will see the sign of the cross either carved into it or painted onto it. You will see the calendar year, and the Greek alpha and the omega, showing that Christ is the beginning and end of all history

What does Resurrection mean? At this moment in our world there is, no doubt, the feeling that death and destruction are more apparent than the focus of the religious festivity we celebrate at Easter. What does resurrection mean then in the face of war, death, destruction, the cost-of-living crisis, and the spectre of our country possibly running out of fuel? The response to the historic problem of human suffering and disappointment can take only two paths. The first is that o

This evening, the Solemn Vigil of the Sunday of the Most Holy Resurrection of the Lord, we are at the very centre, the very heart of the faith, the prayer, and the life of the Church, the assembly of all those who by faith are incorporated into Christ. Easter Sunday is the feast of feasts. The first Christian communities had only one annual feast, Easter Sunday, which was echoed in all of the other Sundays of the year – each Sunday is first and foremost a celebration of the r